Case Study

Cloud Computing Case Study - AlwaysOnVacation - ProfitBricks

AlwaysOnVacation Home Page

ProfitBricks helps popular accommodation marketplace migrate to the cloud, saving them 50%

Situation

AlwaysOnVacation is a vacation rental portal, enabling owners to list their properties and travelers to browse and search thousands of options in 120 countries. With six million visitors per month and 65,000 vacation rental properties on their books, they are one of the world’s largest rental marketplaces. The vacation rental industry is a competitive one, and the site’s performance is critical to visitor engagement levels and conversions.

Prior to working with ProfitBricks, AlwaysOnVacation had been using AWS. With a complex and unpredictable pricing structure, high costs and rigid standardized server sizes, AlwaysOnVacation needed to migrate to a platform they could trust to offer flexible, price/performance-leading cloud computing.

Solution

That’s when David Chen, VP of Engineering at AlwaysOnVacation, learned about ProfitBricks.

“We decided to migrate to ProfitBricks, and the whole process took just seven days. Without the expert support team, who are always providing assistance and proactive solutions, this would not have been possible.”

AlwaysOnVacation uses a mixed environment of Oracle and Windows with Java and middleware. They use ProfitBricks for all of their staging and production machines, including SOLR Search, MediaFront, MYSQL, Apache and separate instances for third party portals. Each machine is of a different size, according to roles and requirements, and is scaled using ProfitBricks’ Live Vertical Scaling capabilities in the DCD as needed.

AlwaysOnVacation pay only half as much as they previously did and enjoy simple pricing.
“Costs fell by 50 percent instantly after we switched from AWS. We saved money everywhere; on servers, storage and traffic. Additionally ProfitBricks support, which we have been very happy with, is also completely free of charge, so we cut costs there too. ProfitBricks’ pricing is also much more transparent and predictable; we pay for exactly the resources we require rather than being forced to buy more than we need.”

• Better, More Consistent Performance

Performance is one of the most critical elements to consider in the cloud. A slow or unresponsive website causes visitor engagement levels to wane, and potential customers to check out the competition instead.
“Traffic levels drop when page load times slow down, so performance is business-critical for us. ProfitBricks gives me confidence and peace of mind that I will never run into performance-related problems. Windows compliance used to be an issue, but now performance, CPU and storage are all consistently good and reliable. We have experimented with different amounts of RAM to achieve the fastest performance. As a result, we can service a greater number of satisfied users.”

• Convenient, Intuitive Data Center Designer

Using the unique DCD, AlwaysOnVacation can up- and downscale their server sizes according to their shifting requirements. The DCD’s ease-of-use makes system administration easier, so the data center management can be handled by fewer, and less skilled, team members.

“Our licensed software is tied to the amount of CPU, so it’s important to be able to scale this quickly, flexibly and cheaply on the fly. I have two IT employees working with me who can do so when I’m not available. The Data Center Designer allows us to easily visualize and manage our machines and network connections, which is crucial for us as our requirements and architectures change regularly. Using the DCD feels like setting up physical machines.”

• Global Footprint with US and EU Data Centers

Our data center locations in the US and EU enabled AlwaysOnVacation to expand into the European market quickly and with extra data security. They were also able to duplicate data across geographic regions enabling another back up location.

With ProfitBricks, developers can choose between both a SOAP API and a REST API. Using these APIs, cloud computing developers and operations professionals can automate their multi-cloud IaaS processes by utilizing such popular current libraries as jclouds, Libcloud, Fog, and Python SDKs - which are all supported libraries at ProfitBricks.

These APIs assist you in leveraging the rich features and options offered by ProfitBricks. Even the ProfitBricks Data Center Designer, our integrated graphic user interface was built with the API.

Access ProfitBricks Support for Popular Cloud Libraries

ProfitBricks offers support for three multi-cloud libraries at this time: jclouds, Libcloud, Fog - these popular open-source libraries enable developers and operations pros to automate their cloud infrastructure across multiple clouds or migrate applications and workloads from one cloud to another.

Access ProfitBricks Support for Popular Languages with these SDKs

ProfitBricks offers a PythonSDK that abstracts and provides complete coverage for all current API functions; the library is very specific to ProfitBricks and exposes advanced functionality you may not find in a cloud-agnostic library.